The Vagabond's Bookshelf: A Reader's Memoir by Dawn Potter
ISBN: 978-0-9975051-2-2; 89 pages; 6 x 9; $17.95
In this luminous memoir, Dawn Potter considers her personal relationship with the books she has read and reread over the course of her life—works by Leo Tolstoy, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, and many others. Weaving a daily life into a reading life, The Vagabond’s Bookshelf is a celebration of our deep yet mutable relationship to literature and the world.
DAWN POTTER directs the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching. She is the author of seven books of prose and poetry, including the award-winning memoir Tracing Paradise: Two Years in Harmony with John Milton. She lives in Portland, Maine.
My kind may exist only in books. At least, books are the only place where we seem to meet. We are more than merely readers; we are obsessive readers. And we go further yet: we are obsessive rereaders, choosing to visit the same volume ten, twenty, fifty times—not because we are scholars or teachers but because the book itself has become necessary to us, like a cigarette habit.
—other books by Dawn Potter on this site; The Conversation and Boy Land & Other Poems
Excerpts from the The Vagabond’s Bookshelf have appeared in journals such as the Southern Review and the Threepenny Review. Dawn’s previous memoir, Tracing Paradise: Two Years in Harmony with John Milton, won the 2010 Maine Literary Award for Nonfiction.